I haven’t produced an ADD t-shirt yet; not intentionally. But this one might qualify. If there’s any sort of logic to my thinking, it’s a fuzzy one; a never-ending flowchart of associations, where everything is eventually connected.

I’m writing this post on January 12, 2011.

It’s amazing — or not amazing at all, knowing me as I do — that I’ve learned so little in those two years.

I wrote about my learning curve in that 2009 post. I think I described it as a bridge that vanished over the horizon. It was hyperbole meant to console me — ADD is a thing of the brain, after all. By definition it should be human-scaled, and amenable to understanding. It was vast in the way that God is vast — really, really big, but still modeled on its creators.

All I had to do was understand myself. Map my mental genome. Produce a clean blueprint. Scale it up a bit and the bridge wouldn’t seem so daunting. Either the bridge would shrink or I would expand. We’d meet in the middle.

Two years later I’ve discovered that the bridge is no smaller. It might even be bigger. The bridge seems uncrossable. And what good is a bridge that can’t be crossed?

I look at the bridge between my understanding and acceptance of ADD, and where I stand now, and I still can’t see the other end.

I can’t believe I built it.

What was I thinking? I needed something like wheelchair access to circumvent the stairs of a non-ADD world. I didn’t need a planet-spanning arch.

Note to self: build smaller. Think Ikea, not Asgard.

*A more official diagnosis wouldn’t arrive until I’d seen my new therapist for a few months. I told him in our first session that I had ADD, or thought I had ADD, and I wanted to focus on ADD, and by the way, do I really have ADD?

It’s this:

There’s a cartoon posted at Nobrow Cartoons.

I’ve been thinking about this pun for a long time. I’ve been meaning to draw it and send it to Neatorama’s Neato Shop (as a t-shirt.) I wasn’t planning to draw it today. It was on my list, but only because it’s been on my list for the last few months. But I was sidetracked by writing a long post about puns — I’m trying to post more often at my cartoon blog, as proof that I haven’t expired along with my career — and using the aforementioned cartoon as my example.

I did a few edits that lasted a few minutes that lasted a few hours that came to a halt when I reared back, grabbed hold of my desk to prevent further sliding (down the slippery slope of Time), saved the draft, and staggered away.

Good, I said. I stopped. Wasted an hour too many, but I stopped.

Good.

But I didn’t feel all that good. I’d spent two hours writing about a cartoon that I haven’t drawn because it might take two hours to draw it.

So I boldly went where I hadn’t gone before. Did a little research. Drew a first draft, scanned it, tweaked it, colored it, and sent it to Neatorama.

Elapsed time: 1 hour, 38 minutes. I didn’t redraw it. I didn’t let it sit for days while I revised it. I didn’t aim for perfection. I aimed to get it done.

It’s the weirdest feeling. Almost Lovecraftian.

via comics alliance.

I don’t know all of the steps — and being an atheist, surrendering to a higher power isn’t likely to happen — but for the steps I know, courtesy of friends and family, Seinfeld episodes — apologizing to those you’ve hurt, accepting that certain aspects of ADD are out of your control — there seems to be a kinship.

Every recovering alcoholic starts his day by reminding himself that he’s an alcoholic, and to act accordingly; often with the emphasis on ACT. Playing the part, following the script of a recovering alcoholic.

I start my day by reminding myself that I’m a recovering ADD, with my own script to follow, in the form of To Do lists, timers, clean desks, regular breaks. And when possible, forgiveness and acceptance of my shortcomings.

I don’t always feel like I’m recovering.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my lists and convoluted work-arounds out the window and spending  my day writing blog posts, even when it’s 11:35 in the morning and I have an appointment with my therapist in an hour or so and I should be in the shower with music blasting against the walls because I hate the tedium of taking a shower…

My name is Mark, and I’m a recovering ADDer.*

*I still don’t know what to call myself. ADDer. ADDist. ADDholic. Or my new favorite: ADDict (I can’t seem to break my ADD habit.) When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I noticed that you could be a diabetic, or you could have diabetes.  You could be the disease, or be a person with the disease. I appreciated the distinction.

So am I a person with ADD, or am I the disability? My knee-jerk answer: I’m a person with ADD.

But as I discover how much of my life is designed by ADD, how well it fits the limits of ADD, I have to wonder if I am ADD.

Or, to borrow another consideration, which came first: the chicken or the egg, me or ADD?

Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. Quite often I can’t; or I can, but the words don’t fit. There’s a deadline. Good is good enough. Maybe less than good is good enough. Most readers don’t dwell over cartoons. They like the joke, or they don’t. Few will block out an hour in their schedule to puzzle over why the joke worked or didn’t.

I will. I have the time. Or I think I do. What do I know? I have ADD.

I study the shoddy word choices, the clunky rhythms. I poke at gaps in the joints of what I’ve built.

If I’m writing a comic strip with a nuanced idea or convoluted plot, the gaps are loop holes. If I’m writing a greeting card, the gaps are yawning voids in the place of sentiment. If I’m writing a single-panel cartoon, the gaps are cracks in the punchline. Readers stumble, miss the joke.

If I’m not writing to a deadline, of course, I have the time to get the words right. But I’ve discovered that it upsets my ADD. Sloppy writing in the company of finished art is unsettling. It’s an unresolved tension. An engine of stress. I tell myself I’ll set the strip aside and fix the writing later. The important thing is that I finished the art. I got something done. Kept moving. And usually this is true.* But wherever I leave the unfinished work, I still hear that motor, pulling me in, wrenching my brain. Fix it. Make it work. Do it now because there’s a good chance your editing will flood the engine, bust a piston, grind the works into an oil-less, inert writer’s block.

The trick is to avoid stress, in a profession that invites it.

Sometimes I feel that I live in a double-negative world. Nothing makes sense when I first see it. I look at other cartoonists who get things done and I envy them. I see them as characters in a children’s magazine, representing the good choices, the good behaviors. I try to follow their example and it rarely works. The instructions that suit me are the ones most avoid. Negatives become double-negatives. My motto: don’t do what Danny Do does.

(This insight inspired by Bart Simpson, who once said, “Don’t do what Danny Don’t Does.”)

2. If possible, resist enlarging the image on the computer screen. That way lies madness. It’s a descent into detail that few — okay, none — will notice. Too often I’ll be sanding the rough edge off a line when I lean back and notice that I’ve spent the last hour tweaking art that’s been magnified 800% or more. Polishing individual pixels. Erasing dots. One step away from using a laser to position atoms on the tip of a needle.

Rarely has hyperfocus — if it exists — proved so literal.

Mulling over pixels is hypnotic. An agreeable trance. A soak in a mud bath. A pampered world where phones don’t ring, appointments aren’t kept, nothing else matters — chores, bills, analysis, self-recrimination.

It’s an out of body experience. My spirit becomes an add-on for Photoshop. I’m a graphics program with one instruction, one concern: color a pixel.

It’s endlessly fascinating. A Fantastic Voyage. I feel myself shrinking as I describe it. My mind, my self, becoming infinitesimal. And then the long fall through the gaps between atoms — within atoms — and the mindless freedom to hum along with the electrons.

Time doesn’t keep time at that scale.

It’s ADD paradise.

*My brain is like a shark that needs to swim without rest, sluicing oxygen through its gill slits; to settle in one place is to invite a cloudy dementia, an obsession with my failures — why can’t I finish what I’m doing? Should I be doing something else? What should I do next?  It’s as if my shark brain is shutting down, oxygen deprived, unable to think itself into a solution. I’ve read that sharks don’t actually need to swim in perpetuity. Most do. Or some. Maybe a few. I should research my analogies. But the notion still works: when I feel like I’m confused, graying out, lethargic, moribund, sinking into depression, I move. I leave the desk, the couch, the room, the house — whatever it takes to wake my brain. I don’t have a destination — not at first. I just need to move.